AWS network overview
When we discuss AWS services, we need to start at the top, with Regions and Availability Zones (AZs). They have big implications for all of our services. At the time of writing this book, AWS listed 22 geographic regions and 69 AZs around the world. In the words of AWS Global Cloud Infrastructure, (https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/):
"The AWS Cloud infrastructure is built around Regions and Availability Zones (AZs). AWS Regions provide multiple, physically separated and isolated Availability Zones which are connected with low latency, high throughput, and highly redundant networking."
For a nice visualization of AWS Regions that can be filtered by AZ, Region, and so on, please check out: https://www.infrastructure.aws/.
Some of the services AWS offers are global (such as the IAM user we created), but most of the services are Region-based. The Regions are geographic footprints, such as US-East, US-West...